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The boy who was King Arthur

Leave yourself behind, and you'll always be true to yourself. This is what Rippan Kapur's life tells us, says C. Y. Gopinath

RIPPAN WAS KING ARTHUR. It was a school production about a small but dangerous ogre who threatens the king as he rides through a jungle. Arthur contemplates the beast, and then decides it is really too small for him to fight. The years pass, and the ogre grows larger and more powerful, but Arthur always deigns to slay it. Finally, the monster is a giant advancing to kill the king. With great reluctance, for he hates violence, King Arthur engages it in combat, and of course, wins. I heard this anecdote from one of Rippan's schoolteachers and it struck me that she didn't seem sure any more who was the teacher and who the taught. Her organisation is among the countless that have come into being on the shoulders of Child Relief & You, Rippan's only child. Gloria was much older than 40-year-old Rippan, but already age had become trivial. The man was larger than his years. If your glance moved to the low table in the corner of the hall, you would have seen a framed photograph of Rippan, and it might have struck you that he couldn't have looked less like any king. In fact, with his pixie eyes and small-boned, sharp profile, he could have passed more easily for a prankster. If you ever chatted with him, his turn of phrase might have struck you as decidedly collegian, with its heavy dependence on yaars and euphemisms. All in all, there is a good chance that Rippan, in his white khadi kurta and disappearing presence, would have fooled you completely. What an ordinary fellow. So much like everyone else. They say he works with Air India as a purser. Looks the type.

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The first time I saw him, I was mildly annoyed. It was 12 years ago, and the time was close to midnight. Our sleep was disturbed by Rippan standing in the driveway two floors below and calling out to my sister. She would drop whatever she was doing, pick up her art materials and vanish for hours. While the parents conjectured about what was going on, I wondered why Rippan never bothered to come up to say hullo. We didn't know, any of us, that this slight young man carried in his belly a fire much more fierce than ordinary people possessed. My sister, still in art school then, was merely one of dozens who had been infected by Rippan's cause. According to him, he was only one human being, and there was far too little time. Everywhere, children were being brutalised, scarred, battered. They were being claimed by destitution, discrimination, disease, every inequity that cold, unfeeling minds can conceive and construct. To Rippan, no life had meaning if it could not respond to the violence that we subject our children to. Lesser individuals might have had time to say hullo; Rippan was always behind schedule. I did not understand the zeal for a long time; it took even longer to acknowledge that it was sacred. I have a hazy recollection of a long, heated debate with Rippan, in his house. CRY was by then a known name, and Rippan, as eccentric as only he could be, had decided to raise funds through an event called Circus Magic. Three British clowns would entertain slum children in India, and use the event to raise money for CRY. I got to know Rippan a little better then, but I was still farther away than I realised. Why, I asked him one evening, did he carry such a low opinion of people who left CRY? I had heard that Rippan almost took it as a personal insult when someone moved away from working for children. Is it not enough, I asked him, that people do what they can, to the extent they can, for as long as they can? Rippan has always been impatient with such intellectualism. He politely parried with me for a while, and then wound it all up with, "Look, I don't have time to argue about these things. It's not enough that you do what you can do. You have to do more than you can do. Otherwise it's not good enough." He lived fervently by his own rule; by 40, he had packed several eras into a lifetime of dreaming and doing. During his last days in hospital, right till the time came to leave, King Arthur was planning new conquests, spinning detailed tales of aftermaths and consequences, sure that no one, not even God, would have the heart to interrupt such a vital enterprise. I don't think, though, that Rippan believed in God. The fact that children needed CRY must have somehow been proof to him that if there was a divinity, it didn't care very much.

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Rippan cared, and cared more than he ever revealed. He was not given to mush or melancholy, and a love that did not express itself in a deed was no love in his view. But today, in his wake, it is clear that Rippan, of all the humans I know, loved uniquely all his life, in ways that we cannot and dare not. His heart belonged to a generation crawling in the dust, and he existed for them alone. His most remarkable achievement as the founder of CRY must be the anonymity he effortlessly shrouded himself in. Rippan was not a star. He was King Arthur in a shepherd's garb. Sometimes, even the sheep didn't know he was there. A few hundred gathered at CRY last week for a prayer meeting, people who had dealt with CRY, people who had known Rippan. But it was not a requiem, it was a hosannah. As they spoke, one by one, haltingly, laughing and remembering this merely extraordinary soul, Rippan filled the room like incense. It was not grief that made my eyes wet. It was the knowledge that there, in that hall, prevailed a spirit as ordinary as mine and immeasurably larger, purer, bolder and beyond conquest. Rippan never stood for mere Rippan alone, and if his old teacher thought he had something to teach her, it must have been this — if you really want to travel to travel far, you have to leave yourself behind.